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JChoe Profile picture
JChoe
@JoohnChoe
Activist, researcher and consultant. Cited/mentioned in NYT, Washington Post, USAToday, Kyiv Post, NATO Hybrid COE. #NAFO Assistant (to the) Sanctions Manager.
dakotamoonlite Profile picture UnkleBobby Profile picture daniel 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 Profile picture Sir Meows of Bonkerton 🌻🇺🇦🍺 Profile picture Nataliia Medzhybovska Profile picture 6 subscribed
May 8 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Screw it, let's do the "Bear Versus Dude In The Woods" thing. This is easy for Europeans.

Think of it like this: why would someone prefer to run across a bear in the woods versus a Russian?

Well, bears are potentially dangerous, but they mind their own business don't they?
(🧵) And a bear won't murder you and then justify it by saying you were a Nazi.

A bear won't shoot down a plane with your people on it then lie about it, and not even well.

A bear won't act like an ally then screw you over when it's convenient.

Russia does all of these things.
Apr 24 • 17 tweets • 7 min read
This is probably the best picture of what just happened to Mike Johnson in the past two weeks and it fits what Ukrainian-American activists and NAFO have done into a traceable effect; the discharge petition, it turns out, might have been the most important thing we did.

(🧵) Image At this point, Politico, The New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post all have pretty thoroughly researched articles out explaining what happened, in more or less obviously tilted language. That's enough to start opining about what actually happened.
Apr 24 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
This is an optimistic NAFO thread.

Remember how things were in January - hell, two weeks ago? Compare that to how it feels right now.

That's what a win in an asymmetric fight feels like.

(🧵) Image Remember what we've been up against: there's legit Kremlin documents out there saying they're fighting Ukraine aid using industrial-scale lying (I guess "industrial-scale" is getting trendy to use as political verbiage? well that's where it's from).

That's what fed that loop.
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Apr 23 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
if you stand back and do a "hot wash"/AAR on the past six months of utter idiocy on Ukraine aid, from the perspective of trying to set up America for success in non-linear wars and global great-powers competition

that is one hell of an ugly AAR The Republican-controlled majority kicked out McCarthy for working with Democrats to stop the government from being shut down

Then elected Johnson who immediately... worked with Democrats to keep the government from being shut down
Apr 23 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
On April 17 the Washington Post published a classified addendum to the “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation" that a European intelligence service leaked to Catherine Belton, this is the full translation via Google Translate.

This is a real interesting document.

1/9
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Image It's from March '23; on my reading, it construes alliance & containment efforts like NATO as existential threats to Russia's conduct of foreign policy and calls for the creation of a parallel hegemonic order based outside the "Euro-Atlantic".

2/9
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Apr 22 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This is a smart enough answer that I took notes, here are my notes

You can argue with this but not really productively I think, this covers the main points startlingly well
Image it's tempting to assign this a value of "goal to plan backwards from" and then try to design steps to get there, as a plan-backwards exercise

so the end-state we're after is post-war Russian reform, with contours that aren't precisely knowable, and a sort of referendum on empire
Apr 20 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Here's what's about to happen to Ukraine aid next.

@SenSchumer kept the Senate in session and gave, like, a warning order or "WARNO" that roll call votes were possible.

In analysis, that means they're staying in session to get Ukraine aid done.

1/4 Image Bolton for The Hill reports that the Senate is in session today not just for the aid package(s) clearing the House but also get some work on FISA reauthorization done. They need unanimous consent to do that, which they don't (and I'd guess won't) have

2/4
 thehill.com/homenews/senat…

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Apr 20 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
I think @purplemermaid82 is onto something, and it's at least damn interesting to look

You don't even need to go into speculation or conjecture or somewhat sus news sites (Debkafile, anyone) this is all in "mainstream" news.

Here, I'll show you - Start Feb 28; Yonah Jeremy Bob for Jerusalem Post reports that

"the IAEA reported that Iran had reduced its stockpile of 60 percent enriched uranium by 6.8 kilograms (kg), after having grown this stockpile almost continuously since early 2021"

jpost.com/middle-east/ar…
Apr 19 • 23 tweets • 10 min read
So people want to hear why I think Mike Johnson and Republican moderates flipped on aid to Ukraine in the past 96 hours? OK, here goes:

Mike Johnson's shift in attitude has to do with religion and political capital calculations, in that order, I think.

Start with background - Four big things tell you about who Mike Johnson is as a political operator, in my opinion.

One, his Black "son" and the oddly inconsistent story that he tells about when and how they met.

I don't think that's the son going to the Naval Academy.
Apr 19 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Someone told me the other day it's in America's best interest for Biden to not just win, but win by a lot.

The point they were making is, there needs to be a significant repudiation of Trumpism for us to move on

There's another good reason though

(🧵)
The problem this time around won't be a disrupted transition - the incumbent will still be in power.

But I think it'll work out a lot like the Transition Integrity Project scenario wargames in '20, if you really game it out.
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Apr 18 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
So what you're seeing in this tweet here is one of the signals to me that something is happening.

It looks to me like there's a broadening rift within the Georgia Republican Party; people like Clyde are on one side and Kemp, once considered for POTUS, is on the other.

1/5
Image This is at odds with Republican messaging on otherwise hot-button topics for them like abortion.

As Roll Call predicted in January, they "pivoted" on the idea of a national abortion ban because it's a losing issue for them and they know it.

2/5
 rollcall.com/2024/01/25/gop…
Apr 16 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
I've been offline all day but it's easy to figure out where Ukraine aid stands; it's a definite change in things that I'm not sure how to read quite yet.

Here's 3 headlines all saying the same thing: aid is getting split.

There are clues about how to read it in the text.

(🧵)

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Image By Friday, if this pattern of events hold, there could be a vote on Ukraine aid, finally.

What's about to happen is the Senate supplemental being split up into four pieces that are then modified; it gets a 72-hour deliberation period, so basically this week. Image
Apr 9 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
This probably sounded pretty smart in his head, and it might even seem decently smart if you don't really read it.

Read it. It's bad.

Watch me refute this:

1/8
Image Colby's first point is essentially, the aid package won't help because it won't "change the fundamentals".

CIA Director Burns smacks this down himself on Mar 11 2024 talking to the Senate, reported by Patrick Tucker at DefenseOne:

2/8
 defenseone.com/threats/2024/0…
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Apr 8 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
That's not a joke, it's actually a 109-tweet thread

Badhwar argues, persuasively I think, for adjusting Ukraine funding accounting on cumulative replacement costs for existing & new drawdown authority

You might quibble with the politics - I do - but the homework is there
Image The critical thing to understand to get Badhwar's argument is that:

1) replacement costs are not 1:1 to "net book value" of military assets drawn down & sent to Ukraine - that is acquisition cost minus depreciation

Sometimes we buy new/different stuff

Apr 4 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
OK, so HCR is usually startlingly insightful, but this one in particular people should read/listen to

This starts somewhere you should find familiar if you track Ukraine war policy: Trump has Grenell basically running a second foreign policy

1/11
Image The article she's referring to is this.

If anything, HCR somewhat undersells the significance of what Grenell is doing.

This isn't the first foreign policy norm that Trump has broken but it's a big one.

2/11

washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/…
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Apr 1 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Monitoring the Unit 29155/UHI story, it seems like it is, indeed, a big deal, but in an interesting kind of way

On Facebook at least, this is going to 'odd news', liberal anti-Trump resistance accounts and not as many right-wing conspiracy theory groups as you might think

1/3

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Image So, comment sections for Axios and 60 Minutes itself are quieter than I'd expect, considering this is literally some Robert Ludlum/Tom Clancy stuff straight out of a spy movie

1.

2.

2/3 facebook.com/10005956176845…
facebook.com/10005939935894…

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Apr 1 • 13 tweets • 6 min read
This is the world of evidenced assessment instead of wild speculation, so it's being undersold; this is big.

I see why Zaid & Grozev were acting cagey.

The Unidentified Health Incidents (UHI) referred to as 'Havana Syndrome' are Russia's "wetworks" unit, GRU Unit 29155.

1/8
Image In '20 the New York Times did a piece on GRU Unit 29155, your bullet points are:

- operated for a decade
- staffed by veterans, led by a dude named Averyanov
- they did Skripal and other ops too

This is legit spy stuff, folks.

2/8
 nytimes.com/2019/10/08/wor…


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Mar 29 • 15 tweets • 7 min read
one source: "SOME WEIRD SPY STUFF HAPPENED!"

ok, well, that's inter-

second source: "WEIRD SPY STUFF IN POLAND!"

huh ok if there's a -

third source: "POLAND, WEIRD SPY STUFF"

...OK fine let's look

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Image FirstPost reports a joint Polish/Czech operation uncovered a spy network, this is *separate* from the propaganda network bust

firstpost.com/world/russian-…
Mar 25 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
A few key events happened in the world I'm tracking that it's probably worth recording publicly.

There are two things that can happen with Ukraine aid right now:

1/18

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Image 1) Johnson pushes it to April and, potentially, May, delaying aid even further using time-wasting never-pass legislation as cover

2) Hakeem Jeffries gets a vote on the Senate-passed aid supplemental in exchange for saving Johnson from Marjorie Taylor Green's motion to vacate.
Mar 15 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
if the world's 3rd richest man retweets a video purporting to show Haitian cannibalism (I suspect it's the Chinese theme park video) as part of an ongoing xenophobic rant, that's a bigger problem than just a misleadingly labeled video

The word for that is "blood libel"
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Image you have to fuck up pretty bad to get zapped on your OWN SOCIAL NETWORK but that's what Elon did, y'all

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Mar 10 • 16 tweets • 7 min read
So it's interesting to think of NAFO in terms of information war proportionality.

Ajir & Vailliant '18 gets cited enough that it looks like it's still valid, but this doesn't seem to get processed much:

The issue is a category mismatch; what fellas do isn't really "cyber".
1/🧵
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Image So, on Agir & Vailliant's account, the correct way to think about NAFO might not really be a form of cyber war, though it'd heavily overlap.

Rather, NAFO is a form of (defensive) psychological war in a digital disinformation context.
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